Mr. George H. M. Owen, Secretary of the North Welsh
Property Defence Association, sends to Wednesday's Times a most important correspondence between himself and Mr. Gladstone's private secretary on the question whether Mr. Gladstone was right in saying that when English landlords had reduced their rents by 24 per cent., Welsh landlords had only reduced it, on an average, by 7 per cent., while in four counties it had not been reduced at all. He shows that Mr. Gladstone was relying on Schedule A of the Income-tax returns, which does not show either temporary reductions of rent, though these in Wales have varied from 33 to 5 per cent., or the very large set-offs in the shape of repairs and improvements which the Welsh landlords in North Wales have been in the habit of making to a much greater extent than English landlords. But the greatest source of error in Mr. Gladstone's comparison is this,—that England, which is a wheat-growing country, suffered enormously more than Wales, which grows exceedingly little wheat, so that reductions of rent in Wales should only be expected on the scale on which they have been made in non-wheat-growing English counties ; and if the comparison had been instituted with such counties, the Welsh landlords would not have been found in any way behind the English landlords. In Cheshire, Monmouth, Cornwall, Westmoreland, and Devon, the reduc- tions of rent, he declares, and the rise and fall in annual values, will be found much the same as in Wales ; while in Norfolk, Essex, and Lincoln, the enormous fall in rents has been due to the fall in the price of wheat, which, without such a re- duction, cannot compete with the imported wheat. It is pretty clear that Mr. Gladstone's attempt to raise a Welsh land question has been imprudent and premature, and founded on imaginary assumptions.
